Specification and rapid deployment of communication protocols for peer-to-peer systems

by 1978- Kannan, Gopinathan

Protocol Specification techniques have been used traditionally for verification of communication protocols. With the fast growing Internet and increasing uses of mobile devices, ubiquitous computing has come to the limelight of commercial and academic research. More and more technologies such as peer-to-peer systems are emerging that enable mobile devices to surf between networks with minimum effort and have access to a plethora of services. However, in order to use a particular service, the user needs to know the communication protocol(s), specifying the exchange of information needed to use the service successfully. In this thesis, we address this problem in a peer-to-peer system (JXTA) by developing a protocol specification and implementation mechanism using Petri nets, and a protocol management infrastructure to upload the protocol dynamically and access the service associated with that protocol as and when requested by a peer.